INDEX: UK Media Publishers & Publications- January 2016

By Joseph Schwartz

INDEX: UK Media Publishers & Publications- January 2016

Last month we released the complete index of UK media publishers and publications, ranked by combining desktop and mobile page-views in the U.K. However, in the media world, things can change rapidly and, as such, we will be updating this list on a monthly basis, tracking trends and highlighting certain other metrics.

In the charts below, the number in green represents how many places the publication/publisher rose compared to its rank in all of 2015, and red shows how many places it dropped. The complete list of publishers and publications which can be found here, also shows the combined mobile and desktop page-views and details what percent of the page-views came from the 2 sources. This allows you to discover, for example, that the top 2 publications by mobile percent share are health.com and viralnova.com. Of health.com’s near 12 million January page-views, 76% came from mobile, and of viralnova.com’s 7 million page-views, 69% were from mobile.

With publishers, we once again took the top 150 and combined the page-views for all their publications (sites with a small audience were not considered). In some cases, a publisher only owns one publication, like in the case of Head-fi, a news and review site specifically for headphones. Head-fi has an large following in the UK and January 2016 saw the publication rise 51 spots on the index so it now ranks 108th overall. An example of a publisher with multiple publications is IAC who own collegehumor.com and thedailybeast.com. In 2015, IAC ranked 74th, but in January 2016, the publisher improved to 36th.

When ranked by page-views, the top publisher in the U.K. remains The British Broadcasting Corporation and in January 2016, the media giant had close to 2 billion desktop and mobiel page-views. Of the top 25, the publisher who improved the most since 2015 was Yahoo, who rose an impressive 12 spots and now rank 7th overall. Two other top publishers showed big gains, News Corp who own sites such as wsj.com, thesun.co.uk, and thetimes.co.uk, and Hearst Corporation who own magazines such as seventeen.com and cosmopolitan.co.uk. Both publishers rose 8 spots in the rankings and both had over 40 million page-views in January.

Turning now to publications, January’s big winner was news.ycombinator.com, a site dedicated to start-ups and tech. The site became increasingly popular in January 2016 and rose an impressive 142 spots in the rankings. Aside for Y Combinator, 5 other sites saw their rank improve over 100 places each, led by alphr.org, another publication focused on new technologies. Other sites that showed immense growth were 2 Polish publications, niezalezna.pl who rose 130 spots, and wyborcza.pl who jumped 78 spots.

Looking now at the top 25 publications by January page-views, there was little movement at the top of the rankings as numbers 1-5 remain unchanged from the 2015 rankings. The biggest jump among the top 25 belonged to bloomberg.com who rose 21 spots and now rank 22nd overall. The American media site had almost 30 million page-views in the U.K. and when examining popular pages, 30% of that traffic was to the page bloomberg.com/europe. Another top 25 publication which saw huge gains was thesun.co.uk which rose 14 spots and now ranks 21st. The Sun is actually an interesting case of a publication scrapping their paywall, a strategy The Sun implemented in late November 2015.

Looking closer at The Sun, we can discover more on how the strategy to remove their paywall affected their web traffic. In the graph below, The Sun’s traffic is combined with page3.com, The Sun’s racy section that features topless and provocative women. When compared to January 2015, the combined traffic grew an impressive 104% and in January 2016, the sites had close to 14 million visits.

When examining other metrics, The Sun and its NSFW partner, also improved in the immediate aftermath of the paywall removal. After the paywall was abolished in November, the sites saw an increase in pages per visit, an important metric which could help The Sun in next month’s rankings.

Joseph is a Digital Insights and Content Manager at SimilarWeb. He has experience in content writing, social media, and analytics. When not tracking digital trends and creating online content, Joseph enjoys hiking, basketball, pickling, and Canadian alternative music.